Human-machine interaction has become an important topic in the robotics community. The capabilities to detect human's presence is necessary to be integrated into an advanced robot. Human face detection, identification, and tracking are essential in active human-robot interaction scheme because the motion of a person's face is deeply related to his intention and attention. Robust human face detection, identification, and tracking have shown its value on various applications, such as taking care of seniors at home or patients in the hospital, enhancing the security in the public place, and delivering products to identified persons, etc.
However, the requirement of accuracy to run above face related tasks on a robot platform is a critical component for an advanced robot to interact with humans in a natural way. The common challenge is that movements of humans and robots are always in uncontrolled environments, which cause both face and background to change quickly over time within the camera scene. Thus, the accuracy of the face-related tasks on a robot may be decreased.
The disclosed system and method are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.